The Covert Heist Agency - Monetisation Design

The Covert Heist Agency (CHA) Is a mobile spy simulation game where you play as a first person spy, tasked with retrieving precious objects without being caught. The goal of this university project was to design a sustainable economic system for a mobile iOS game, generating a sustainable income while maintaining player longevity. This is demonstrated through a prototype developped in Unity.

Skills Gained:

• Game designing for iOS in Unity.
• Setting up a gaming economic system.
• Desinging for monetization.

The MVP

The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the vision screen mechanic: when the player goes into portrait mode, they will be able to look through certain walls, illuminate collectable objects and reveal alarms/enemies. While in this mode, the player will only be able to look around using the phone’s gyroscope. The game is set up in multiple levels, with the goal of each being to collect the “Thisa”. The player also has the option to collect side objectives, gaining them additional points.

The dissplayed assets are temporary placeholders.

Level 1 introduction screen:

Vision screen used to see enemy:

Vision screen used to see collectibles:

Player finding a side objective:

The Thisa:

Antik:

and Mystik:

Monetization

When a player ends a level, they are rewarded with “Emeralds” and “Garnets” which they can spend in the shop. Apart from the vision screen, the player has access to other gadgets such as a grapple hook, which deteriorate over time and require emeralds to be fixed over the period of a day. Alternatively, the player can spend Garnet to fix them immediately in-game. The player can also spend this currency to upgrade their gadgets. Garnets give the player access to all upgrades while Emeralds can only be exchanged for lower quality upgrades as well as taking a day to upgrade. This would give the player motivation to return the subsequent day while more restless players can pay to receive them immediately. Of course, Emeralds & Garnets can be exchanged for real world currency.

The game includes many more monetization methods, such as “technicians” to instantly repair items, “Agents” to locate temporarily available maps faster and purchasable maps to reveal the secret locations of collectibles.

Level 3 ending screen rewarding Emeralds & Garnets:

Vision screen used to locate tirgger button:

Player using the Graple gadget:

Empty vision Screen bar, signalling that the gadget is broken:

Conclusion

There are several other methods that could be used to assure CHA’s longevity, such as using player statistics to measure gadget popularity & map difficulty, or implement customisable maps to create a self sufficient content system.
I recieved a 95/100 for this MA project.